Monday, June 22, 2015

Deep in the heart of Texas …

For
the next three weeks I’m on the road – talking with clients, users and of
course, HP. I will be presenting at N2TUG, a vital NonStop user group in
Dallas, on behalf of a client even as I am being challenged - Hit a Home Run
with HP’s NonStop X!

Having just crossed the state line into Texas, shortly we
will be on our way to Dallas where we will set up temporary company Command
Center from which we will be working for the next six days. N2TUG will be the
first engagement, before catching up with clients and prospects; squeezing in a
side trip to good friends at IBM is also part of the plan. Yes, IBM, and given
my long history with straddling the fence separating two of the biggest players
in enterprise computing, it’s always good to see whether the grass is truly
greener on one side or the other.

Cadillac Ranch – ever been there? A monument to cars of decades past, converted
over time into art forms some appreciate while others quickly dismiss as
vandalism and graffiti-riddled; half empty spray paint cans litter the ground, just waiting to be picked up for a little ad-lib! And yet, they stand as sentinels from a time
when Cadillac truly represented the very peak of automotive excellence – yes
all those years ago the Cadillac of cars was a Cadillac. Sitting back on the
fence, I often wonder if the IBM of computers is any longer IBM? Or HP? Or
anyone else for that matter – and more relevant given today’s cavernous data
centers full of nameless server farms, is there a role for quality, and of
course, the three Rs - resilience, robustness and reliability!

We passed the Cadillac Ranch a short time ago even if that only adds confusion
about our exact route to Dallas, but more about that will have to wait until I
post to the social blog, Buckle-Up.
What’s more important though is the disruption inside the data center we have
all witnessed in just this millennium. It’s been 15 years and while I can
recall the 1990s well, and even parts of the 1980s, though the timing of
specific events is proving more difficult to pinpoint of late, it seems a very
short period of time and yet, despite the havoc wrought by the collapse of the
dot com bubble, we have the internet as ubiquitous as everyone expected it to
be, the blossoming of the smartphone and tablet marketplace and yes, the broad
acceptance of open source and with it, the applying of the IT “seal of
approval” on all things cloud related.

Survival - yes, the Cadillac survived even as it has morphed into something
quite different than anything that had been produced in the past – a Cadillac
station wagon with a supercharged V8 that was as much at home in a supermarket
carpark as it was hurtling around the famed Nordschleife, or North Loop, of the
Nürburgring! Today Cadillac’s best seller continues to be its SUV, a category
not even invented in Cadillac’s heyday in the 1950s. In a recent interview with
Cisco CEO, John Chambers, on the CBS This Morning show, he quoted Intel’s And
Grove (in part) when he said, “Only the paranoid survive”. Grove’s complete
quote was that “Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only
the paranoid survive.” And for many, this succinctly sums up a good number of decades
in the life of Cadillac.

However, two other comments Chambers made (and I am not sure whether he was
quoting others, although he made no mention of that) were, facing a recent
audience of CEOs, he said “40% of the business here (in the room) will be gone
in 10 years.” Even for the paranoid, this certainly sounds alarming but then,
Chambers went on to note that today, “companies either disrupt or are
disrupted.” All up a cute way to say that you have better innovate to the point
where you disrupt a technology or marketplace or else; others will be doing the
disruption and you will miss out, leading to your own demise. Again, “Success
breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.”

What we have all witnessed in just the last year and a half is HP upping the
ante on NonStop. Doubling down, if you look at it another way – yes, HP
investment in NonStop is apparent and the product family just unveiled is as
modern, and indeed as relevant, as any other server in the marketplace. When it
comes to NonStop X, many argue that the hardware journey has ended and that
from here on out, it’s all about the software and that may indeed be true. But
don’t think you can cable together your own servers and switches and simply
order a NonStop distribution to throw on top of it all – HP is very much in the
solution space and so NonStop will be a blend of commodity hardware together
with the integrated stack comprising the hardware, the fabric, the OS, the data
base, etc. Success, yes! Complacency, I don’t think so, well, at least not now
given the evidence we have with the availability of NonStop X.

But then again, even as the expression “complacent” may have been levelled at
Cadillac for several decades, perhaps the paranoid inside GM did survive and
with their survival, a new car has emerged and it’s just “borrowing” the
Cadillac moniker. Somehow it reminds me of the lyrics to the song by the
Eagles, James Dean, “You were too fast to live, too young to die, bye-bye”.
Fast? Perhaps it’s best left to Bruce Springsteen who gave us the song,
Cadillac Ranch, where you can hear the lyrics, “Open up your engines let 'em
roar; Tearing up the highway like a big old dinosaur”. It’s no
surprise then to hear that on my first trip to Raleigh, N.C., in the early
1980s, the IBM VP who picked me up was
driving the latest Cadillac Coupe de Ville – by then Cadillac was no longer
fast, but somehow out on the interstate it felt like a dinosaur and the
association with all things IBM wasn’t lost on me. Another case, perhaps, of
“Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid
survive.”

Before Chambers finished his interview with CBS he made one comment, and this
time it was regarding JPMorgan Chase CEO, Jamie Dimon. It was about Dimon’s May
2015 conversation with the Wall Street analysts that has been referenced
numerous times since as what Banks
Can Learn From Silicon Valley. The way Chambers told the story, Silicon
Valley is coming to Wall Street and we all becoming technology companies. What
Dimon actually said, talking of how Silicon Valley is increasingly encroaching
on businesses once controlled by banks, "Silicon Valley is good at getting
rid of pain points; Banks are good at creating them. In a capitalist society,
you better be looking for ways to do things better, faster, and cheaper."
You better be the disruptor or you will be disrupted and yes, 40% of businesses
will be gone in ten years mostly because they failed to heed this simple
message.

The question remains – does HP have more to do for NonStop to ensure it
continues to be disruptive? Is the value proposition from being available,
scalable and dare I add secure with great data integrity, still relevant
especially as we see the gradual shift from baby boomers to millennials to Gen
X’s and shortly, even Gen Z running
today’s data centers? True, with their exposure to consumer devices that
routinely drop calls, screw-up downloads has educated a whole generation that
it’s OK to restart or even power off / power on? Has availability lost all relevance today?
Once Cadillac epitomized luxury but, thanks to Madison Ave. marketers, luxury
no longer means all that much to anyone buying a car. And yet, even as NonStop
continues to epitomize availability, there’s a place in every data center for
NonStop. No, there may have been a perception of complacency over NonStop, but
no longer and there’s plenty of opportunity to generate even more success in
the future.

Heading into Dallas and to the upcoming N2TUG user group meeting, it was hard
to miss the message of their open invitation to the NonStop Community. “N2TUG
presents ‘Hit a Home Run with HP’s NonStop X’” with its reference to finishing
the day with a visit to the ballpark of the Texas Rangers baseball team. But
hitting a home run is exactly what the arrival of the NonStop X family of
systems is all about and perhaps after all Intel’s Andy Grove only got it half
right – it wasn’t that the paranoid survive but perhaps, after all these years
and with the right product families, the paranoid thrive! Yes, to quote another
Texas family, this is turning out to be a good day, for a good day!